by Philip Roth
For her everything is “just” something else that will not satisfy. Schoolwork, painting, writing, marriage, children, religion, promiscuity, even madness—it is all as nothing to “the way it can be,” which is to say, the way it once was and can never be again. In the clutch of her need—Need might as well be her name—the little growing mistress, as good as abandoned by the brother off in boarding school, even has a go at bestiality with the family dog; and the only degradation, from her standpoint, consists in ludicrously failing to accomplish the copulation, which might at least have been a kind of commemorative transgression honoring the incestuous union that has been torn asunder by school.
“In India,” the molested child muses, while her seventh-grade teacher drones on, “the nine-year-old girls were married and having babies by now … if I lived in India I could have a husband and a child and it wouldn’t all be so boring.” The point of view is not Humbert Humbert’s but Lolita’s—only a Lolita with heart and nerves exposed, a little girl at once more ordinary and more loving, and, for that reason, more profoundly destroyed. This remarkably persuasive first novel about one who was a woman when she might better have been a girl—and as a consequence is still a little girl when she would herself prefer to be a woman—is as much of a love song to childhood incest as it is a perverse validation of that universal taboo … perverse because it says: “Little girl, thou shalt not know the bliss of being the ravished kid sister—otherwise the longings for the big bad brother will be a torment forevermore.”
The nature of the grown sister’s torment is expressed succinctly, perfectly, in the two words with which the book begins, and from which it takes its indirect course: “Can’t concentrate.” This is as short-winded as she will be. From there sentences unwind like ribbon off a spool of morbid desire and rapturous misery. Can’t concentrate. The two words are spoken by the nameless heroine when? As she whiles away the time beneath her copulating husband, the “Turtle,” who stolidly endures her. But the Turtle, like the Present, is an enormous distraction at the edge of her senses, there only to generate frenzied boredom. The Present is simply what bars her way back to those first thrills.
“Thrills.” “Freaks.” “Unreal.” “Fucked-up.” “Spooked.” These catchwords of the late sixties, used to death finally by the underground press, by students, by adherents of rock, drugs, and “revolution,” as well as by salesmen of bell-bottom jeans, turn up along the way in Playing House—somewhat surprisingly too, since the heroine seems to know nothing whatsoever of the turbulence out there beyond her incestuous preoccupation. This woman is no hippie and no “kid.” True, after “dropping a tab,” she screams, “It’s a bummer,” but when she is hospitalized her self-portrait emerges from something more private and painful than counterculture Morse code: “I’m standing in the middle of the room in a white hospital gown like a pillar that was once part of something more.” And, though Wagman chooses to introduce a chapter with a quotation attributed to Bob Dylan about the “smoke rings of my mind”—and in straining to lay bare her heroine’s misery sometimes twangs out a little pop-record poetry herself—“so you couldn’t hear my song after all” … “a million dreams that broke my heart”—the fact is that her prose has more in common with Dylan Thomas’s childhood recollections. It is there in the wide-eyed childishness of her cadences, in the breathy stringing together of the peculiar with the homely, in the characters who are named and seen as in a nursery rhyme. She can at her best be just as guileless and rhapsodic as the author of Under Milk Wood, and what’s more, lacking his literary sophistication and his desire to charm, can pull it off without necessarily being endearing in the process. There is too much torment and depravity for the childishness, at age ten or thirty, to cloy. She may seem at one moment just a little too chummy with a swan she regularly talks to, but the swan is itself as unimpressed as the most rigid Freudian analyst. And life with her puppy dog is, for this little American girl, unambiguously unsentimental and unwholesome.
The traumatized child; the institutionalized wife; the haunting desire; the ghastly business of getting through the day—what is striking about Wagman’s treatment of these contemporary motifs is the voice of longing in which the heroine unashamedly confesses to the incestuous need that is at once her undoing and her only hope. It is a voice that owes nothing, finally, to either of the Dylans, or to the demonic pop lingo of the last decade—or to post-Freudian currents in literature or psychology. To readers of Stekel or Virginia Woolf or hardcore pornography, it might appear that the writer is a student, in her fashion, of all three. But in fact, the sado-masochistic scenario, the fervent streamingness of the surface, and the graphic rendering of the sexually unsavory issue in one gush from the imagination of an authentic and unself-conscious middle-class primitive. Her moral outlook is so much a matter of personality that there is really no valid argument possible between her sense of things and anyone else’s. I don’t imagine that even at a later stage of development as a novelist she will ever come up against the kind of opposition, from without or within, that informs the novel of dramatic struggle. The only irony Fredrica Wagman’s heroine is able to know is the irony of her own enslavement; she is beyond everyone’s reach, poor woman, except the one who touched her first.
Imagining Jews*
1. Portnoy’s Fame—and Mine
Alas, it wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind. Particularly as I was one of those students of the fifties who came to books by way of a fairly good but rather priestly literary education, in which writing poems and novels was assumed to eclipse all else in what we called “moral seriousness.” As it happened, our use of that word “moral”—in private conversations about our daily affairs as easily as in papers and classroom discussions—tended often to camouflage and dignify vast reaches of naïveté, and served frequently only to restore at a more prestigious cultural level the same respectability that one had imagined oneself in flight from in (of all places) the English department.
The emphasis upon literary activity as a form of ethical conduct, as perhaps even the way to the good life, certainly suited the times: the postwar onslaught of a mass electronically amplified philistine culture did look to some young literary people like myself to be the work of the Devil’s legions, and High Art in turn the only refuge of the godly, a 1950’s version of the pietistic colony established in Massachusetts Bay. Also, the idea that literature was the domain of the truly virtuous would seem to have suited my character, which, though not exactly puritanical at heart, seemed that way in some key reflexes. So, inasmuch as I thought about Fame when I was starting out as a writer in my early twenties, I only naturally assumed that if and when it ever came my way, it would come as it had to Mann’s Aschenbach, as Honor. Death in Venice, page 10: “But he had attained to honour, and honour, he used to say, is the natural goal towards which every considerable talent presses with whip and spur. Yes, one might put it that his whole career had been one conscious and overweening ascent to honour, which left in the rear all the misgivings or self-derogation which might have hampered him.”
In the case of Aschenbach it was not his lustful fantasies (replete with mythological illusions but masturbatory at bottom) for which he is to be remembered by the “shocked and respectful world [that] received the news of his decease,” but, altogether to the contrary, for powerful narratives like “The Abject, which taught a whole grateful generation that a man can still be capable of moral resolution even after he has plumbed the depths of knowledge.…” Now that is something like the sort of reputation I’d had in mind for myself. But, as it was to turn out, the narrative of mine that elicited a strong response from a part of a generation, at least, “taught” less about the capacity for moral resolve than about moral remission and its confusions—and about those masturbatory fantasies that generally don’t come decked out in adolescence (and in Newark) in classical decor.
Instead of taking an honorific place in the public imagination à la Gustave von Aschenbach, with the publicati
on of Portnoy’s Complaint, in February 1969, I suddenly found myself famous from one end of the continent to the other for being everything that Aschenbach had suppressed and kept a shameful secret right down to his morally resolute end. Jacqueline Susann, discussing her colleagues with Johnny Carson, tickled ten million Americans by saying that she’d like to meet me but didn’t want to shake my hand. Didn’t want to shake my hand—she, of all people? And from time to time the columnist Leonard Lyons had a ten-word tidbit about my fiery romance with Barbra Streisand: “Barbra Streisand has no complaints about her dates with Philip Roth.” Dot dot dot. True enough, in a manner of speaking, since, as it happened, the famous Jewish girl celebrity and the newly minted Jewish boy celebrity had and still have never met.
There was to be a considerable amount of this kind of media myth-making, sometimes benign and silly enough, and sometimes, for me at least, pretty unsettling. In order to be out of the direct line of fire, however, I had decided to leave my New York apartment just after publication day, and so while “Philip Roth” began boldly to put in public appearances where I myself had not yet dared to tread, or twist, I took up residence for four months at the Yaddo retreat for writers, composers, and artists in Saratoga Springs.
Mostly, news about my Doppelgänger’s activities, of which the foregoing is but a small sample, came to me through the mail: anecdotes in letters from friends, clippings from the columnists, communications (and gentle, amused admonitions) from my lawyer on inquiries from me about libel and defamation of character. One evening in the second month of my Yaddo stay, I received a phone call from an editor (and friend) in a New York publishing house. He apologized for intruding on me, but at work that afternoon he had heard that I had suffered a breakdown and been committed to a hospital; he was phoning just to be sure it wasn’t so. In only a matter of weeks news of the breakdown and commitment had spread westward, across the Continental Divide, out to California, where they do things in a big way. There, preparatory to a discussion of my new novel at a temple book program, announcement of Philip Roth’s misfortune was made to the audience from the platform; having thus placed the author in proper perspective, they apparently went on to an objective discussion of the book.
In May, finally, at about the time I was considering returning to New York, I telephoned down to Bloomingdale’s one day to try to correct an error that had turned up in my charge account for several months in succession. At the other end, the woman in the charge department gasped and said, “Philip Roth? Is this the Philip Roth?” Tentatively: “Yes.” “But you’re supposed to be in an insane asylum!” “Oh, am I?” I replied lightheartedly, trying, as they say, to roll with the punch, but knowing full well that the charge department at Bloomingdale’s wouldn’t talk that way to Gustave von Aschenbach if he called to report an error in his charge account. Oh no, Tadzio-lover though he was, it would still be, “Yes, Herr von Aschenbach; oh, we’re terribly sorry for any inconvenience, Herr von Aschenbach—oh, do forgive us, Maestro, please.”
Which was, as I have said, more like what I’d had in mind upon starting out on my own conscious and overweening ascent to honor.
* * *
Why was Portnoy’s Complaint at once such a hit and such a scandal? To begin, a novel in the guise of a confession was received and judged by any number of readers as a confession in the guise of a novel. That sort of reading, wherein a work is dwarfed in significance by the impulse or the personal circumstance which is imagined to have generated it, is nothing new; however, just such an interest in fiction was intensified in the late sixties by a passion for spontaneity and candor that colored even the drabbest lives and expressed itself in the pop rhetoric with phrases like “Tell it like it is,” “Let it all hang out,” etc. There were, of course, good solid reasons for this yearning for raw truth during the last years of the Vietnam War, but nonetheless its roots in individual consciousness were frequently pretty shallow, and had to do with little more than conforming to the psychological custom of the moment.
An example from the world of “bookchat” (as Gore Vidal has nicely named it): in what he charitably called his “thoughts” for the “end of the year,” the New York Times book reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who twice in 1969 had gone on record as an admirer of Portnoy’s Complaint, announced himself to be a no-holds-barred kind of guy with this bold and challenging endorsement of first-person narration and the confessional approach: “I want the novelist,” wrote Lehmann-Haupt, “to bare his soul, to stop playing games, to cease sublimating.” Bold, challenging, and inevitably to be flatly contradicted by the Times daily reviewer when he caught hold of the pendulum of received opinion as it swung the other way in the ensuing years, toward disguise, artifice, fantasy, montage, and complicated irony. By 1974, Lehmann-Haupt could actually disapprove of Grace Paley’s personal-seeming (and, in fact, highly stylized) short stories in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute for precisely the reasons he had given to praise such a book five years earlier—and without the slightest understanding that for a writer like Grace Paley (or Mark Twain or Henry Miller), as for an actor like Marlon Brando, creating the illusion of intimacy and spontaneity is not just a matter of letting your hair down and being yourself but of inventing a whole new idea of what “being yourself” sounds and looks like; “naturalness” happens not to grow on trees.
“You can see Mrs. Paley getting closer and closer to autobiography,” Lehmann-Haupt writes about Enormous Changes, “leaning increasingly on a fictional self she calls Faith, and revealing more and more the sources of her imagination. In short, it now seems as if she no longer had the strength or the will to transmute life into art.… What has gone wrong, then? What has sapped the author of her will to turn experience into fiction—if that in fact is the trouble?” The trouble? Wrong? Well, mindlessness marches on. Still, by keeping track of the “thoughts” of a Lehmann-Haupt, one can over the years see just which hand-me-down, uncomprehended literary dogma is at work, in a given cultural moment, making fiction accessible and “important” to insensate readers like himself.
In the case of my own “confession,” it did not diminish the voyeuristic kick—to call it by its rightful name—to remember that the novelist who was assumed to be baring his soul and ceasing to sublimate had formerly drawn a rather long, serious, even solemn, face. Nor did it hurt that the subject which this supposed confession focused on at some length was known to one and all and publicly disowned by just about as many: masturbation. That this shameful, solitary addiction was described in graphic detail, and with gusto, must have done much to attract to the book an audience that previously had shown little interest in my writing. Till Portnoy’s Complaint, no novel of mine had sold more than twenty-five thousand hardcover copies, and the hardcover edition of my first book of stories had sold only twelve thousand copies (and hadn’t yet gained nationwide attention by way of the Ali McGraw movie, which was released some months after the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint). For Portnoy’s Complaint, however, 420,000 people—or seven times as many as had purchased my three previous books combined—stepped up to the bookstore cash register with $6.95, plus tax, in hand, and half of them within the first ten weeks the book was on sale.
It would seem then that masturbation was a dirtier little secret than even Alexander Portnoy had imagined. Indeed, I would think that the same highly charged preoccupation that prompted so many people who never buy a book to buy one that encouraged them to laugh at a “cunt crazy” masturbator of the respectable classes (and perhaps thereby to ease whatever concern might still attach to their own indulgences) also revealed itself in the coast-to-coast rumor assuring any in need of assurance that for his excesses the author himself had had to be carted off to that mythical lunatic asylum to which folklorists have been consigning unregenerate onanists since self-abuse began.
To be sure, the farcical treatment of masturbation does not explain entirely the avidity with which this particular bestseller was purchased and apparently even read. I think
now that the moment when it was published—perhaps unlike any since the early days of World War II for sustained social disorientation—had much to do with their avidity and my own subsequent celebrity, and notoriety. Without the disasters and upheavals of the year 1968, coming as they did at the end of a decade that had been marked by blasphemous defiance of authority and loss of faith in the public order, I doubt that a book like mine would have achieved such renown in 1969. Even three or four years earlier, a realistic novel that treated family authority with comical impiety and depicted sex as the farcical side of a seemingly respectable citizen’s life would probably have been a good deal less tolerable—and comprehensible—to the middle-class Americans who bought the book, and would have been treated much more marginally (and, I suspect, hostilely) by the media that publicized it. But by the final year of the sixties, the national education in the irrational and the extreme had been so brilliantly conducted by our Dr. Johnson, with help from both enemies and friends, that, for all its tasteless revelations about everyday sexual obsession and the unromantic side of the family romance, even something like Portnoy’s Complaint was suddenly within the range of the tolerable. Finding that they could tolerate it may even have been a source of the book’s appeal to a good number of its readers.
However: the impious and unseemly in Portnoy’s Complaint would still not have been quite so alluring (and, to many, so offensive) if it weren’t for the other key element which, I think, worked to make the wayward hero a somewhat more interesting case than he might otherwise have been at that moment for those Americans whose own psychic armor had been battered by the sixties: the man confessing to forbidden sexual acts and gross offenses against the family order and ordinary decency was a Jew. And that was true whether you read the novel as a novel or as a thinly veiled autobiography.
